found in the Middle East. Moreover, marriage was
not only planned by parents, and approved by the
imam, but the youthful adolescents who were mar-
ried lived under the supervision of adults until such
time as they were deemed sufficiently mature to
manage on their own. All this was in keeping with
the belief that Islamic society required strong disci-
plinary leadership to protect the community
against the sexual evils of society at large, and to
foster a true women’s role. These utopian commu-
nities looked to the Prophet Mu™ammad’s political
position in Medina, and to his relationships with
his wives as models for constructing a valid
American Muslim identity.
The developments attending
the feminist agenda
Feminist ideology has also had a marked impact
on Muslims in the United States. Concerns over the
role and position of women in a patriarchal society
developed into a full-blown critique of the in-
equities between men and women in Western cul-
ture. However, it is important to note that the roots
of the feminist critique begin not with feminist con-
tentions of the twentieth century, but with Western
critiques of Islam from the medieval period, when
Christian adversaries singled out Mu™ammad’s
relationships with women as demonstrative of
Islam’s inferiority. The result was that females and
their roles in Islam became a lightning rod for anti-
Islamic fervor in the West. The intensity of this
critique guaranteed that gender issues would dom-
inate the symbolic world of cultural knowledge,
making it virtually impossible today to compre-
hend the nuances of Muslim women’s actual lives.
Reactions to the virulence of this campaign began
to be felt in the Muslim world, with the result that
such elements as Muslim dress codes became ways
of expressing identity, difference, and ultimately
rejection of the West. In sum, many contemporary
aspects of Muslim women’s lives, and the meaning
of their gendered existences, arise out of an agenda
imposed by or in reaction to the Western interpre-
tation of the feminine.
It is not surprising, then, that Islamic sensitivities
to the feminist critique should take several con-
tentious forms. There are advocates of Islamic
feminism, Islamicist (fundamentalist) feminism,
and Islamic womanism in various permutations
throughout the United States. The first accepts that
the Western critique of Islamic society and the way
it treats women is somewhat justified; Muslim
scholars such as Mernissi, Ahmad, and Hassan
portray Muslim society as patriarchal, while care-
fully disengaging the Qur±àn from their critique.
the united states 169They insist that Islam must return to the equality
present in the Qur±àn’s teachings and in the life of
the Prophet in order to free itself from the distor-
tion that centuries of patriarchal exegesis have
introduced. Moreover, some American Muslim
women see both the conceptualization of woman’s
body and the submissive discourse within tradi-
tional Qur±ànic understandings as problematic for
the true achievement of an equal gender ideology.
Fundamentalist or Islamicist feminism eschews this
discourse, holding that such analyses are merely the
application of secularist doctrine to a religious cul-
ture that rejects the secular outright. These femi-
nists argue for an Islam disengaged from its cultural
moorings, and point to an Islam of religious power
and authority affirming the original vision of God’s
Holy Book. Writers such as Dunya Maumoon
insist on the veracity of the Qur±àn’s depiction of
women and their rights; furthermore, Mahmood
and others see ample evidence of a distinctive
affirming of women’s body and a contextualized
meaning of submissiveness within Islamicist doc-
trine. Still others react to long-standing Muslim
antagonism to the very term feminism, and try
to shape a new perspective that will embrace the
best within Islamic culture without challenging the
basis of the Qur±àn’s own wording. Dubbed Islamic
womanism, this trend regards the distinctive
emphasis placed on the “feminine” to be quite for-
eign to Islam, insisting that the true Islamic under-
standing of gender is one of complementarity.
Theoretically akin to Dove’s argument for post-
colonial Africa, womanist discourse sees “tradi-
tional” Muslim society as importantly, but
differently, matriarchal, with roles and responsibil-
ities that allow gender to function synergistically in
the wider Islamic culture. Womanists see this as
anything but a passive discussion; rather they insist
upon the gender equality in the Qur±àn as the foun-
dation for discourses within Muslim homes and
communities, a kind of participatory process of
determining true Islamic identity. Barazangi terms
this “participatory feminism,” but it is feminist
only to the extent that it begins its analysis from
what women contribute to the corporate Muslim
whole. Within the American context, then, femi-
nism has been a catalyst that has sparked a heated
debate both within and without the umma, and has
cognate significance for Muslim women, gender
issues, and family life.Reactions to the rise of
Islamism (fundamentalism)
While feminist discourses have been carried on
largely at the formal and academic levels, it is